A timely post about from http://www.jihadwatch.org about Islamophobia. This follows this post about U.S. presidential candidates. This follows this article about American energy independence and preventing money from going to hostile countries. For more, you can read two very interesting books HERE.You can follow me here.
I received an email from “Stan,” who wrote to respond to my article “
Donald Trump and Counter-Jihad.”
Through Google I discovered that Stan is an Ivy-League-educated PhD.
“Counter-jihadists,” Stan wrote, “deny that Islam was indeed more
tolerant from the end of the 11th century down to the 17th.” Catholic
Church teaching during that period “was far worse than dhimmitude … Jews
and Christians could practice their religions … [There were] few forced
conversions or massacres.” Catholic Spain expelled Jews who fled to
Muslim territory. I would recognize these facts, Stan kindly advised me,
“If you pick up a history book.” “No historian would consult with
Robert Spencer,” as I do, Stan sniffed. Stan listed sixteen books
addressing Christian anti-Semitism. If I had any “interest in the
subject,” I would read them. Stan mentioned the 1209-1229 Catholic
Crusade against Albigensians. “Would you rather have been an Albigensian
in southern France or in Constantinople?” Please note: my article about
Donald Trump never mentions Jews, Catholics, or Albigensians.
Counter-jihadis regularly confront variations of this: “Any
intolerance that Islam shows today is the result of historical forces.
Violence and intolerance are not inherent in Islam. Terrorism is caused
by European colonialism, the recognition of the state of Israel,
America’s support for dictators, and American wars-for-oil. In the past,
Christianity was a violent, intolerant religion. The passage of time
reformed Christianity; in the same way the passage of time will reform
Islam.”
How can a counter-jihadi respond?
- Differentiate between behaviors inspired by temporary historical circumstance and behavior inspired by canonical documents.
- Recognize that most conventionally educated Westerners believe extravagant falsehoods and aren’t aware of important truths.
- Be aware of events outside of Western Europe and North America.
Differentiate between behaviors inspired by temporary historical circumstance and behavior inspired by canonical documents.
Scholars who describe medieval, Muslim Spain as relatively better for
Jews than medieval, Christian Europe acknowledge that differences were
inspired by temporary historical circumstance and not canonical
scripture. Given that medieval socioeconomic conditions no longer exist,
but canonical scriptures are still considered divine revelations, we
should not expect medieval Muslim tolerance of Jews, or medieval
Christian persecution of Jews, to recur. We should, rather, look to
canonical scripture as inspiration for behavior.
Mohammed was an Arab, living in Arabia, among Arab Pagans, Jews, and Christians. Mohammed is
al-Insan al-Kamil,
the perfect human, worthy of emulation. Hostility to Jews is overt in
the Koran, the hadith, and the biography of Mohammed. See, for example,
here,
here,
here, and
here. Mohammed
wiped out a Jewish tribe.
Mohammed inspected Jewish boys to determine if they had pubic hair as a precursor to slaughter. Mohammed supervised the torture-murder of
Kinana, to rob him of gold and take his wife. Mohammed
expelled Christians and Jews from the Arabian Peninsula, where they cannot live to this day.
Bukhari 1:24 reports that Allah ordered Mohammed to make war on all mankind till Islam dominates the planet.
As part of daily prayer, Muslims repeat
seventeen times a day that
Jews anger God. Muslims commonly believe that the Koran is flawless, and that
the Bible is corrupt. Merely possessing a Bible in Saudi Arabia is cause for imprisonment and torture.
In short, hostility to Jews is inextricable from Mohammed’s
biography, the Koran, the hadith, and mandated daily Muslim prayer.
Muslims have long been inspired by the ostensibly divine Koran to do
what the Koran tells them to do:
hate,
murder,
torture,
steal, and
rape.
Jesus, on the other hand, was a Jew. He lived in Israel, the Jewish
homeland. Jesus was knowledgeable about and respectful of Jewish
scripture. Jesus’ disciples and the authors of the New Testament were
Jews. Christians accept Jewish scriptures as divinely inspired. Jesus
declared that
salvation is from the Jews. God
continued to love the Jews and his promises to them are irrevocable. The Vatican
cites these scriptures.
The harsh criticisms of some, not all, Jews in the New Testament were
written by Jews as part of Jewish tradition. The most severe passages
are less severe than those in the Torah. Compare
Matthew 23, where Jesus excoriates the Pharisees for straining on a gnat and choking on a camel, to
Exodus 32,
where God orders Jews, immediately, to massacre thousands of their own
“brothers, friends, and neighbors” for worshipping a golden calf.
Jesus specifically taught that his disciples were not to interfere
with free will. If people chose not to be Christians, Jesus said,
just move on. Jesus never ordered his disciples to make converts by force, or to oppress nonbelievers. In contradistinction to Bukhari 1:24,
Koran 66:9,
Koran 5:51 and many similar verses, Jesus, in the
Good Samaritan episode, counsels his followers to treat all humanity, not just fellow believers, with compassion.
Spreading the faith by military conquest was not part of foundational
Christianity; for its first three hundred years, Christianity was an
outlawed and persecuted faith. The second century Greek Pagan
Celsus
described early Christianity as a marginal “religion of women, children
and slaves.” Every time a Christian violates a Jew or anyone else, that
Christian violates his own professed belief system.
When Christians committed crimes against Jews, other Christians
protested and attempted to intervene. During the medieval Rhineland
Massacres of the Crusades, Catholic bishops attempted
to protect Jews. Popes repeatedly
condemned blood libel. When Jews were expelled from Western Europe, they were invited into Catholic Poland and protected by the 1264
Statute of Kalisz and the 1573
Warsaw Confederation.
Confession and repentance are Christian rituals and virtues. Jesus
taught his followers to pray, “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive
those who trespass against us.” Christians have confessed their sins
against Jews, and resolved to improve. This emphasis on confession and
repentance is not found in Islam. Turkey, for example, prosecuted Orhan
Pamuk, its own Nobel-Prize-winning writer, for merely mentioning the
Armenian Genocide.
Why, then, have Christians committed horrible crimes against Jews?
Why did Christians, including priests, twist the original Christian
message into one of hatred against Jews? And why have Muslim states
tolerated Jews?
One ray of light into this complicated topic is
Edna Bonacich’s work on middleman minorities.
Jews in Europe occupied a particular socioeconomic niche. Jews were
middlemen. Medieval Christians and Medieval Muslims viewed middlemen
differently. That difference, not scripture, affected Jewish lives
differently in medieval Christian and medieval Muslim countries.
Mark R. Cohen, Princeton University professor emeritus, is the author of
Under Crescent and Cross: The Jews in the Middle Ages, a book frequently cited to support the “Islam was more tolerant” generalization.
In his 1986
Jerusalem Quarterly article “Islam and the Jews:
Myth, Counter-Myth, History,” Cohen acknowledges that Islam contains a
“fundamental theological hostility towards the religion of Judaism … and
towards Jews, stigmatized … as contemptible infidels.” Various
historical and socioeconomic factors trumped Islam’s “fundamental
theological hostility.” One of those factors was how Muslims viewed
middlemen.
Mohammed was a merchant. He was born and lived most of his life in
Mecca, a trading center. “Islam was born with a positive attitude
towards commerce … Mohammed’s own life and … the Koran and other holy
literature lent strong support to the mercantile life … Since many
jurists in the early Islamic period were themselves merchants, Islamic
law was shaped to meet the needs of a mercantile economy.” In the Muslim
world, both Jews and Muslims were both moneylenders.
Medieval Christian Europeans were mostly peasants – poor people who
valued rootedness, labor, and land. Jesus was a carpenter who preached
the virtue of poverty. He lived in Galilee, a region of country
bumpkins. Markets, money, travel and banks were underdeveloped in much
of medieval Europe. Jews traveled, handled money, and appeared not to
labor, as peasants understood labor. The Jew as merchant and moneylender
was more troubling to economically naïve European Christians than to
more economically sophisticated Middle Eastern Muslims.
Further, Cohen points out, Jews in medieval Europe were not just
economically and religiously alien, they were ethnically and
geographically alien. Jews were comparatively familiar to Middle Eastern
Muslims – they came from the same geographic region, they spoke a
language related to Arabic, similarly written right to left, and they
shared a similar physical appearance.
Cohen cites another flashpoint for Jews living in Christian lands.
Christianity separates church and state. This separation is rooted in
Jesus’
saying, “Render
unto Cesar what is Cesar’s and unto God what is God’s.” Jews had to
develop relationships with both secular and religious authorities. One
might be friendly while the other might not be. Church and state might
be in competition. The Jew was often stuck in the middle of that often
violent competition.
In Islam, there is no separation of church and state. Jews had to
cultivate fewer powers, and they did not have to worry about a
non-existent competition between centers of power. Cohen says that it is
this separation of church and state in Christianity, and the lack of
same in Islam, that explains why, during the medieval period, Jews were
sometimes expelled from Christian nations, but not from Muslim ones.
Another factor Cohen cites for Jews’ position in Islam. “In Europe,
the Jews nurtured a pronounced hatred for Christians, whom they
considered to be idolaters subject to the anti-pagan discriminatory
provisions of the ancient Mishnah … the Jews of Islam had a markedly
different attitude towards” Islam. There was a “tolerant Jewish view of
Islam.”
In 2016, Dario Fernandez-Morera published
The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise: Muslims, Christians, and Jews under Islamic Rule in Medieval Spain. In 2013 he argued in
Comparative Civilizations Review that
Muslims favored Jews in Spain for tactical reasons. Visigoths, the
rulers in Spain before the Muslim Conquest, discriminated against Jews.
When Muslims invaded, significant numbers of Jews aided the Muslims as a
way to improve their own lot. Muslims, he said, regarded Jews as
“servants,” not as friends, and thus avoided violating the Koran’s
admonition
not to take Jews as friends.
Muslim rulers feared betrayal from other Muslims. Elevating Jews to
powerful positions protected the ruler’s back. A Jew, as a member of a
hated minority, could never usurp a Muslim.
Fernandez-Morera cautions contemporary Jews against romanticizing
their forebears’ lives in Muslim Spain. Islamic law mandated that Jews
had to pay the jizya, could not build synagogues, had to keep their
buildings shorter than Muslims’ buildings, could not carry weapons or
ride horses, and had to show deference to Muslims, including by wearing
distinctive clothing. They could not testify in court against a Muslim.
There were harsher court sentences for Jews than for Muslims. Jews could
not criticize Islam. Capital punishment was prescribed for a Jewish man
who had sex with a Muslim woman. (Compare this to the medieval Polish
legend of Catholic King Casimir the Great and his Jewish companion,
Esterka.) Even if these mandates were not always followed, Cohen writes,
the “themes of segregation and humiliation” in “Islamic sources … rival
if not exceed … the Christian West.” Canonical Islamic prescriptions
communicated to Jews their subordinate status and kept them in their
place.
Fernandez-Morera quotes a satirical poem that refers to Jews as
“apes,” as does the Koran. Jews, the Muslim poet says, should be “the
lowest of the low, roaming among us, with their little bags, with
contempt, degradation and scorn as their lot, scrambling in the
dunghills for colored rags, to shroud their dead for burial … hasten to
slaughter…do not consider it a breach of faith to kill them.”
Jews’ middleman minority status and their alignment, however tactical
and temporary, with Muslims, may have contributed to Christian
antisemitism. A 1986 University of Notre Dame Press book,
The Jew as Ally of the Muslim: Medieval Roots of Anti-Semitism,
addresses a Europe-wide association, by Christians, of Jews with feared
Muslims. Daniel Pipes’ mostly positive review of the book, that
appeared first in
Commentary, can be viewed
here.
In any case, the twenty-first century understanding of the word
“tolerance” should not be applied to Muslim Spain. A naive person might
envision Jews and Muslims in Al-Andalus sipping cappuccinos and
discussing philosophy while eating rainbow cake celebrating same-sex
weddings and watching their daughters play on the boys’ soccer team.
“Tolerance” meant something very different in medieval Muslim Spain than
it means in 2016.
Suppose someone told a black person that the antebellum South was a “tolerant” place because
Jews were allowed to practice their religion without impediment.
My reaction to discussion of Muslim Spain as “tolerant” is similar to
that black person’s. Muslim Spain relied on slave labor. Its slaves were
my forebears, Slavs. The word “
Saqaliba,” derived from “Slav,” occurs in Arabic in reference to Slavic slaves and to eunuchs. In 961, there were
13,750 Saqaliba eunuchs in Cordoba alone.
Jews
were often the slave traders who transported Slavic slaves to Muslim
Spain. Saint Adalbert’s attempt to liberate Slavs from Jewish slave
traders is depicted on the bronze, twelfth-century
Gniezno doors. Adalbert was later murdered by European Pagans.
Christians were martyred by Pagans
in Europe right up to the fourteenth century. Applying twenty-first
century definitions of “tolerance” and twenty-first century conceptions
of what it means to be a Jew, a Muslim, and a Christian to this medieval
narrative can only cause complete misunderstanding. Christians were not
all-powerful in medieval Europe but were often quite vulnerable. Jews
were not always helpless; some exercised the power that all
slave-traders do. “Tolerant” Muslims were enjoying sexual access to
female and castrated male slaves, not serving up rainbow cake.
Stan asked if I would rather be an Albigensian in Turkey or in
France. I’ve traveled in Turkey and I loved it. Even so, I’d rather not
live as a female Albigensian or a female anything else in any Muslim
country.
When Tariq ibn Ziyad invaded Spain in 711, he delivered a “
sermon”
promising his jihadis Christian women to rape: “In this country there
are a large number of ravishingly beautiful Greek maidens, their
graceful forms are draped in sumptuous gowns on which gleam pearls,
coral, and purest gold.” Muslim chronicler Ibn al-Athir
describes
another Muslim warrior in Spain, who “traversed this land in every
direction, raping women;” another “carried off women.” Yes, violation of
women occurs in all wars, fought by men of every religion. Islam,
though, sanctions rape in war, rape that Muslim chroniclers openly
celebrate.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, a million Jews lived in
Muslim countries. Nine and a half million Jews lived in Europe. This was
57% of the Jews in the world. During the twentieth century, the Jewish
population of the US rose from one to six million, and the
Jewish population of Muslim countries shrank to near zero. Jews voted with their feet.
Jews living in Christian lands gave the world Einstein, Marx, Freud,
Franz Boas, Helena Rubinstein, Artur Rubenstein, Baal Shem Tov, Isaac
Bashevis Singer, Bruno Szulc, Adam Michnik, Disraeli, Gustav Mahler,
Franz Kafka, “
The Jews who invented Hollywood” and the bulk of
Nobel Prizes won by Jews. This is a very different contribution to civilization than the fruits of the brand of “tolerance” practiced in Muslim Spain.
Finally, no generalization about tolerance cancels out Muslim Spain’s less tolerant moments. There is a widespread
belief that Maimonides and his family feigned a conversion to Islam
in order to survive persecution. Maimonides wrote in a letter that “On
account of our sins God has cast us into the midst of this people, the
nation of Ishmael who persecute us severely, and who devise ways to harm
us and to debase us … No nation has ever done more harm to Israel. None
has matched it in debasing and humiliating us.” And one must also
remember events like the Grenada Massacre of 1066, during which a Muslim
mob crucified Jewish vizier Joseph ibn Naghrela and murdered many Jews.
Recognize that most conventionally educated Westerners believe extravagant falsehoods and aren’t aware of important truths.
My World History is a widely used Pearson textbook. It
informs American schoolchildren that Mohammed respected Judaism and
Christianity, Jews and Christians in Muslim lands could practice their
religion freely, the Koran has never been changed, and religious faith
helped Islam spread peacefully. “Islam offered followers a direct path
to God and salvation.” And oh, yes – Islam improved conditions for
women.
Even atheists need to understand politicization and bias in
discussion of religion. Protestant England and Catholic Spain fought for
world domination.
Anti-Catholic propaganda
played a role in that struggle. Much of what conventionally educated
Americans think they know about Catholicism, and, by extension,
Christianity, is simply wrong. Myths about Christianity are used to warp
discussion of Islam.
Here’s an example. Suppose you criticize gender apartheid in Islam.
An Islam-apologist hits back with “common knowledge” about misogyny in
the Catholic Church.
Everybody knows that the witch craze of the Middle Ages was
promulgated by the all-powerful, misogynist Catholic male clergy against
goddess-worshipping healing women, nine million of whom died before
secularization stopped the slaughter. You can learn this history in
The Burning Times a documentary funded by a Western government. You can learn this history from bestselling author
Barbara Ehrenreich, or NPR journalist
Margot Adler.
Here’s the problem. Every “fact” in the above sentence is false. The
witch craze took place during the Early Modern Period and the
Enlightenment, after the Catholic Church lost much of its authority.
During the Middle Ages the Catholic Church adamantly condemned witch
hunting. Accusers were often women themselves, and lay women insisted
that clerics join in. Victims were not healers and they didn’t worship
the goddess; they were simply poor women past the age of fertility
during the hungry times of the wars of the Reformation, the Little Ice
Age, chaotic periods of confused authority, and skyrocketing food
prices. Neither secularization nor science stopped the craze. It stopped
largely because jurists stopped believing that they could prove
accusations in a trial. Not nine million, but between forty and sixty
thousand people were killed, over the course of two hundred years.
Enlightened, anti-Christian, Revolutionary France managed to murder that
many people in the eleven months of the Reign of Terror. Two Catholic
priests – Friedrich Spee and Alonso de Salazar Frías – and believe it or
not, the Spanish Inquisition – were key in stopping the witch craze.
Prominent atheists Steven Pinker and Michael Shermer are both PhDs
and highly respected public intellectuals. Both Pinker and Shermer
champion truth, not convenient propaganda, above all. Both Pinker’s 2012
The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined and Shermer’s 2015
The Moral Arc: How Science Makes Us Better People
tell the same just-so story about a Catholic priest, Friedrich Spee,
who was an eager participant in witch trials until an enlightened
secular ruler stopped him and changed history.
There’s a problem with this anecdote. It is extravagantly false.
There is not a shred of evidence to support it; Spee’s biographer,
Ronald Modras,
condemns it. In fact Father Friedrich Spee was a courageous hero who
put his own life in danger by taking a stance against the witch craze.
He did so because of his Catholic faith. His book,
Cautio Criminalis, helped end witch trials and torture used to extract confessions.
The Catholic Church really wasn’t the force behind the witch craze. Understanding of the Inquisition needs to be completely
revised. The Crusades, too, have been
misunderstood, and need to be
reexamined.
Bernard Lewis has warned against the uncritical dissemination of convenient myths. In his 2001 book,
Islam in History: Ideas, People, and Events in the Middle East, Lewis
wrote,
“The broad outlines of the story, in the simplified and dramatized
form in which great historic events so often reach the popular
imagination, were well defined. The Jew has flourished in Muslim Spain,
had been driven from Christian Spain, and has found a refuge in Muslim
Turkey. The reality was of course more complex, less idyllic, less
one-sided. There had been times of persecution under the Muslims and
times of prosperity under Christian rule in Spain – and many Christian
states … had given shelter to the Spanish Jewish refugees … the golden
age of equal rights was a myth, and belief in it was a result, more than
a cause, of Jewish sympathy for Islam. The myth was invented by Jews in
nineteenth-century Europe as a reproach to Christians – and taken up by
Muslims in our own time as a reproach to Jews.”
Mark R. Cohen echoes Lewis’ warning. “The Jewish-Islamic interfaith
utopia” “a golden age of toleration, of political achievement, and of
remarkably integrated cultural efflorescence” is a “myth invented by
nineteenth-century European Jewish intellectuals frustrated by the
tortuously slow progress of their own integration into gentile society.”
It was the companion to another myth, in “which Jewish life in medieval
Christian Europe was one long chain of suffering.”
The sloppy, popular insistence that Nazism = Christianity is one of the most depressing examples of smart people repeating empty myths for political reasons. In 2009, British celebrity
Stephen Fry suggested that Polish Catholics were responsible for Auschwitz. The otherwise respectable Bernard Lewis writes in his
Semites and Anti-Semites: An Inquiry into Conflict and Prejudice, “There is nothing in Islamic history to parallel … the Nazi Holocaust.”
One wishes that humanity had produced only one genocidal monster like
Hitler. Tamerlane (1370–1405), “The Sword of Islam,” killed a larger
percentage of the world’s population than that killed by Hitler or
Stalin. He was famous for his signature pyramids of human heads. In his
jihad against Hindus, he slaughtered a hundred thousand captive Indians.
He buried four thousand Armenian Christians alive. He massacred
Assyrian Christians; in the twentieth century, their descendants would
be massacred by Muslims in the
Assyrian Genocide,
an event related to the Armenian Genocide. Historian Ashirbadi Lal
Srivastava reports that Tamerlane left “pestilence caused by the
pollution of the air and water by thousands of uncared-for dead bodies …
for two months not a bird moved wing in Delhi.”
Historian Rene Grousset reports that Tamerlane repeatedly cited Islam
as his inspiration. “It is to the Koran to which he continually
appeals.” In the
Malfuzat-i-Timuri, Tamerlane is quoted as saying that he opened the Koran at random to seek guidance and he found
66:9. While vanishingly few parents name their baby “Hitler,” Muslim parents today – including Zubeidat Tsarnaev – name their
children after this murderous monster. There are heroic statues of Tamerlane in Muslim countries; see
here and
here.
One of the books Stan recommended is
Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews, A History, by
James Carroll, a former Catholic priest. Carroll misleads readers about
the deaths of Catholic Poles under Nazism. He does so because he wants
to emphasize how rotten Catholics have been to Jews. That Nazis murdered
and tortured Polish Catholics doesn’t fit neatly into Carroll’s
narrative. Carroll reports that 150 Catholic Poles died at Auschwitz. In
fact, c. 140,000 Poles were imprisoned in Auschwitz, of whom half were
killed.
Critics of Christianity desperately want Nazism to be Christianity,
or to be Christianity’s spawn. As real historians know, Nazism’s goal
was to
eradicate Christianity. In their own documents, Nazis cite
neo-paganism, nationalism, and scientism
as inspirations. In speeches justifying the shooting of “thousands of
leading Poles” and the enslavement and mass murder of Czechs and
Russians, SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler did not cite Christianity as
inspiration. He cited nationalism and science. He and his men were
wiping out “bacteria.” Christianity, to Himmler, was “the greatest of
plagues.”
Top Nazi theorist Alfred Rosenberg hated Christianity. He championed –
wait for it – the very heretics Stan also championed – the
Albigensians. Albigensians, Rosenberg
wrote,
“moved me deeply.” Their “will and character … [were] essentially West
Gothic … They rejected the Old Testament, avoided the use of any and all
Jewish names … even the name of Mary. The crucifix to them appeared an
unworthy symbol.”
Consider: every sadistic, dehumanizing crime – short of genocide –
that Nazis committed against Jews, they also committed against largely
Catholic Romani, aka Gypsies, and Catholic Poles.
Auschwitz was built for, and for the first 18 months of its existence inhabited by,
Poles. Poles were mowed down by
Einsatzgruppen. Rudolf Spanner manufactured soap from Polish corpses. Poles were subjected to medical experimentation.
Polish priests
were singled out for mass murder. Dachau was the “largest monastery in
Germany.” Even as Nazis were losing World War II, they committed the
systematic
destruction of Warsaw,
as part of a cultural genocide. Zyklon B was first used to mass murder
Soviet POWs. Handicapped Germans, not Jews, were the first and last
victims of Nazi mass murder. Of Poles, Hitler stated, “I’ll have anybody
who utters but one word of criticism executed by a firing squad – our
war aim does not consist in reaching certain lines, but in the physical
destruction of the enemy. Accordingly, I have placed my death-head
formation in readiness … with orders to them to send to death
mercilessly and without compassion, men, women, and children of Polish
derivation and language.”
Mentioning what the Nazis did to the Poles, to the Gypsies, to the
handicapped and to Soviet POWs is not to diminish the unique Holocaust
of the Jews. I mention this horrific record to emphasize why the popular
misconception of “Nazism = Christianity” or “Christianity produced
Hitler” “does not withstand examination.
Finally, it must be mentioned, that it was largely Christians,
including my father, who saw heavy combat in World War II, who defeated
Hitler, de-Nazified Germany, and utterly revile Nazism.
In September, 2016, Richard Weikart will publish
Hitler’s Religion: The Twisted Beliefs that Drove the Third Reich. Weikart, author of
Hitler’s Ethic, will take on the popular misconception that Hitler was a Christian, or was inspired by Christian ideas.
Be aware of events outside of Western Europe and North America.
Stan insisted that Islam was tolerant when Christianity was not. Stan
specified the years between 1000 and 1599. To support this
generalization, Stan cited Spain.
During the period Stan specified, Islam was driving into all but
extinction the Zoroastrians of Persia. Citing ancient accounts,
Fariborz Rahnamoon
claims that Arab invaders festooned 24 miles of road with the bodies of
hanging Persians. Arabs ran mills with the blood of slaughtered
Zoroastrians. Zoroastrian scholars were murdered and libraries burned.
Sultan Husayn (1668-1726) ordered the forced conversion of Zoroastrians;
he
slaughtered those
who did not accept Islam. An English traveler’s account describes the
plight of the few surviving Zoroastrians in 1818: “They have nowhere to
look for help and know no place to go where they would be free. They
have made the desert their home and live with all the hardship that
comes with it, just to preserve their religion in their ancient country.
During the onslaught of conversion to Islam, some had taken to the
mountain and others had fled to the bordering lands of India.” The
world’s tiny remaining population of Zoroastrians live in India today.
During Islam’s allegedly tolerant medieval period, Islam was
persecuting the Christians of
Egypt.
In Cairo, in 1343, Muslims accused Christians of being arsonists.
Christians “were seized in the street, burned or slaughtered by the mob
as it left the mosques. Anti-Christian violence raged in the main towns.
To enable the Christians to go out into the streets, Jews would
sometimes lend them their distinctive yellow turban,” writes
Bat Ye’or.
Historian
Philip Jenkins
writes that in 1354, “Mobs demanded that Christians and Jews recite the
Muslim profession of faith upon threat of being burned alive.” Jenkins
quotes a contemporary account by Taqi al-Din al-Maqrizi:
“Many reports came from both Upper and Lower Egypt of Copts being
converted to Islam, frequenting mosques and memorizing the Quran … In
all the provinces of Egypt, both north and south, no church remained
that had not been razed; on many of those sites, mosques were
constructed. For when the Christians’ affliction grew great and their
incomes small, they decided to embrace Islam. Thus Islam spread among
the Christians of Egypt and in the town of Qalyub alone 450 persons were
converted to Islam in a single day … this was a momentous event in
Egyptian history.”
More on Islam’s “tolerant” medieval period. In Jerusalem, in 1009 AD,
Islam razed the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, site of Jesus’ burial and
resurrection. In Egypt, in 1193, Al-Malik Al-Aziz Osman bin Salahadin
Yusuf attempted to tear down the pyramids.
Also during Islam’s “tolerant” period: Islam was savaging the
Balkans, laying seeds for killing and hatred that would last for
hundreds of years. Islam was taking millions of Poles and other Slavs
slaves. The Islamic Slave Trade was dwarfing the Atlantic Slave Trade.
And the Islamic Conquest of India would inspire a profoundly tragic
quote from historian Will Durant, a man who had confronted much human
misery:
“The Islamic conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in
history. It is a discouraging tale, for its evident moral is that
civilization is a precious good, whose delicate complex of order and
freedom, culture and peace, can at any moment be overthrown by
barbarians invading from without or multiplying within.” All this and
more would take place during a period that Stan called a period of
Islamic “tolerance.”
Danusha Goska is the author of Save Send Delete.
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